Black voters ask Supreme Court to back Louisiana’s congressional map in messy fight over race

Civil rights groups urged the US Supreme Court to step into Louisiana’s fraught and potentially far-reaching redistricting battle on Wednesday, asking the justices to rule against some White voters who claim the state legislature violated the Constitution when it drew a second majority-Black district in its congressional map.

Civil rights groups urged the US Supreme Court to step into Louisiana’s fraught and potentially far-reaching redistricting battle on Wednesday, asking the justices to rule against some White voters who claim the state legislature violated the Constitution when it drew a second majority-Black district in its congressional map. The emergency appeal has once again thrust race onto the high court’s docket – and yet again with a short fuse. Louisiana officials say they want a decision by May 15 to have time to administer this year’s elections. Because the case raises fundamental questions about how mapmakers consider race when they redraw congressional boundaries every decade, the Supreme Court’s decision could have national implications. It could also affect control of the US House, given the narrow majority Republicans currently hold in that chamber. At issue is a map drawn by state lawmakers that included a second majority African American district in Louisiana’s six-district congressional plan. A conservative leaning lower court ruled against that map last week, which, according to civil rights groups, has left “Louisiana without a congressional map just months away from the 2024 elections.” Black voters, the civil rights groups noted, “have already been compelled” to vote on a map that lower courts ruled violated the law, with the groups pointing to a separate court’s ruling that said a congressional map that had only one majority-Black district – the map that was ultimately used in 2022 – likely ran afoul of the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court’s intervention, the groups argued Wednesday, “is needed to ensure that harm is not repeated.”